Re: Could you give me your analysis of this?

[Howard Pattee <***>]

Judith writes:
"Closed to efficient causation" means that everything about the system that
involves "efficient cause" is entailed by something else about the system.
It means that there is no one outside the system actively creating the
"efficient cause" aspects of the system-- the system is self-sustaining.

HP: Rosen?s usages of Aristotle?s causes were imaginative metaphors, but they remain 
metaphysical concepts without observable or objectively testable criteria for 
distinguishing these causes in real organisms. This does not mean they are not valuable 
metaphors. It just means that one should remain flexible about meanings and not waste 
time arguing about precise logics that have no testable criteria.

Rosen?s view that, ?the distinctions we have made between genome, environment, and 
phenotype turn out to be directly related to the old Aristotelian categories of 
causation,? makes good metaphorical sense, but there is no way he could be wrong in any 
scientific test. Similarly, we can say that the final cause in biology is natural 
selection, but in effect we are just defining what we mean by final cause. Aristotle 
defined the final cause as God. There is no reason to argue either point as science.

Rosen says (AS p. 413)

a. Initial phenotype is material cause;

b. genome g is a formal cause;

c. fg(a), as an operator on initial phenotype, is efficient cause.

I would agree that this is the best Aristotelian metaphor one can devise, but cell 
physiology is a network of interactions where none of these causes can be empirically 
distinguished. For example, the phenotype operates on the expression of the genes just as 
much as the genes operate on the phenotype.

?Self-sustaining? is another suggestive metaphor, but the concept of ?self? is not 
defined, nor is the concept of ?sustaining.? As John points out, nothing is isolatable in 
life. Life itself, the ecosystem, the population, the organism, and the individual cells, 
has evolved from its origin as an irreducible network.

Howard